hai Ling escaped from China to Cambridge, Massachusetts, six years ago, but the former leader at Tiananmen Square still fights to expose the tyranny in her homeland. Her most potent weapons today are email and an expatriate Chinese software engineer named Ignatius Ding. When government troops brutally attacked nonviolent demonstrators on that June day in 1989, the two became irrevocably bound. Ling was a student organizer; Ding was one of those inspired from a safe distance by the protestors' example. "Before we could retreat," she says, "soldiers began shooting." His response to the event was immediate and visceral: "It woke me up in the most dramatic way. I knew that I had to get involved when the Chinese government opened fire on unarmed civilians." The dissidents who remain still suffer persecution. The pair's mission is to keep the desire for freedom burning while marshaling as much support as possible for the democracy movement. She provides the message; he, the medium. "I can reach millions in a matter of seconds with my email distribution list," says Ding, a self-described cyberwarrior who lives in Cupertino, California. "Dissidents feed me information, and my computerized fax/modem forwards it to congressional offices and the media." Together, Chai Ling and Ignatius Ding chip away at a monolithic state with passion and persistence, with the Internet their not-so-secret weapon. "It's become our special asset to further dialog with people back in China," she says. "When I look back where I came from, I see one person failing; now, hundreds more are standing up for freedom."
|
